March 20, 2005

Tighty-whities: the semantics

Now that Mark Liberman has looked at the phonology
of tighty-whitey (and tidy-whitey and tidy-widy), let's take a quick
first glance at the semantics. To simplify things, I'm going to
reduce the profusion of spellings described here
to one spelling, and in the plural (but, like briefs, with reference to an
individual object) : tighty-whities.

What makes this an interesting question is that the expression is so
recent -- so far it's been traced back to 1990, and is surely a bit
older than that, but its absence from the standard dictionaries and
sources of information on word and phrase histories suggests that it's
probably not more than twenty or so years old -- that you might not
have expected it to have drifted very far semantically. It's also
so (apparently) transparent that you might have expected the components
of tightness and whiteness to have maintained themselves over those few
years. But, as it turns out, the gloss 'men's briefs', even
amended to include whiteness and tightness, doesn't really do the trick.

For a long time, there were briefs, and there were boxers, and briefs
were white, made of cotton, had fly-fronts, had no legs, and caught a
man's equipment in a pouch (hence, were "tighter" than boxers).
These are still the prototypical briefs, though for decades they've been
available in colors and in other fabrics (like silk), without
fly-fronts (these are "bikini briefs", though they aren't necessarily
minimal objects), and in generous dimensions (so, not
constricting). There's even the hybrid the "boxer brief", with
both legs and a pouch.

So the question is: which of these objects count as tighty-whities?

I think that the fly-front is
still non-negotiable (so that American tighty-whities correspond to
British Y-fronts): snug white cotton BIKINI briefs for
men are not tighty-whities. But all the other components already
seem to be negotiable, so maybe this one will become flexible too, and
people will start talking about bikini
tighty-whities. It's already possible to find references
to loose tighty-whities, to red tighty-whities and black tighty-whities
(one writer wonders whether the black ones should be called tighty-blackies), and to silk
tighty-whities.

It looks like the current best gloss for tighty-whities is 'fly-front
briefs', perhaps amended by 'usu. snug, white, and cotton'. The
'men's' component comes for free, given the fly-front component:
fly-front briefs are intended for men, though they can of course be
worn by women (for whatever reason). (There are bikini
briefs made for women, though the line, if there is one, between these
and panties is unclear to
me. Sometimes I think that bikini briefs are just panties for
men. Hey, I wear them myself, and have for decades. I'm not
criticizing guys in bikini briefs.)

A further subtlety is the evaluative dimension of tighty-whities.
It's not entirely clear to me whether the judgments here are directly
on fly-front briefs (esp. snug white cotton ones) and the sort of men
who would wear them, or whether there's an evaluative dimension to the
expression tighty-whities
itself. Both things are possible: sometimes judgments cut across
linguistic expressions, other times they're attached to specific
expressions.

I just don't know what this social world is like, in detail. I
know that some American speakers now view tighty-whities as a negative,
dismissive label (perhaps through association with uptight and tight-assed and even the racial tag
whitey), in a way that (I
think) Y-fronts just doesn't
function in British English, even for people who think Y-fronts are,
well, boring. I know that some people didn't used to have those
judgments. I suspect that some of this is fashion in dress and
some of it is fashion in language, and that it's different for
different people, but I have no idea what the details are like.